Google has announced the third ever webmaster live chat event is taking place this Wednesday at 9am (PST) or noon (EST). You can register for the event over here, Google will be using Google Moderator for the management of questions. Adam Lasnik is introducing the event, while John Mueller will be presenting for 15 minutes […]
Since 2002, we who advocate the paid search niche of marketing have been pretty vocal about how much more this stuff can do than people realize. It’s not pure direct marketing, we’ve pleaded. It can do other stuff too! It can sing, dance, weld, flutter, soar, and giggle. It deodorizes, disinfects, scours, and scrubs – […]
An extensive piece in the NY Times from Sunday discusses the behind-the-scenes drama of the Google-Yahoo paid search deal and how Microsoft has worked to derail it. Consumer and advertiser groups have also expressed objections to the potential arrangement. Entitled “Google Learns Lessons in the Ways of Washington,” it further describes how the Mountain View […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post on common questions sent to them about data issues found in Google Webmaster Tools. The short answer that Google gives is that if the data is off, then it might be due to your site being listed in Google as both the www and non-www and also […]
TechCrunch reports Yahoo is planning of laying off between 1,000 and 3,000 employees. Yahoo Plans Major Cost Cuts, Including Layoffs from the Wall Street Journal expect the cuts to start as early as tomorrow. The cuts come after Yahoo hired consulting firm Bain & Co. to cut costs and improve efficiencies.
The LiveSide blog reports on screen captures showing that Microsoft may be testing rebranding Live Search as Windows Live Search. Here is a snippet from one of the screen captures:
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Yahoo has announced the addition of more local business content to their web search results thanks to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey program. Yahoo has turned on the SearchMonkey applications for both Citysearch and Zagat; users don’t have to opt-in to see enhanced content from those sites — it’s now turned on by default for all users. In […]
Google’s long had a “First Click Free” program that allows news publishers to make their content accessible to search spiders but requires human visitors to login if they’ve already viewed one page on the site for free — hence the “first click free” name. Earlier this year, Google said this program was OK for web […]
One of the unique seasonal activities to do this time of year is to make a trip out to a nearby farm and wander through mazes carved out of corn fields. Designers of these mazes often make them to form interesting pictures or written messages when seen from a bird’s-eye view. I’ve selected a handful […]
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
Today’s news briefs: Google AdWords Editor update, Yahoo Search Marketing content upgrades, and upcoming features for Microsoft’s adCenter. An in-depth guide to some great Firefox plug-ins for search engine marketing professionals, followed up by the free tool of the week: Google’s Conversion Optimizer.
The Google AdWords blog announced they have added a method to the AdWords console to break out search traffic between Google and search partners. Beforehand, you were only able to see a breakout between your content campaigns and search campaigns. Now, you can breakout your AdWords results based on your content campaigns, Google search campaigns […]
Many Wall Street analysts and Google watchers were anticipating that Google might “come down to Earth” with its Q3 earnings today, given the turmoil in the US economy. But in fact the company soundly beat expectations and posted very healthy revenues, driven by Google’s dominance of the only strong segment of online advertising — search. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Like many of you, I’ve attended lots of industry shows and events during the past several months related to search and directional marketing. What is especially amazing to me is how frequently I am asked about the ‘secret sauce’ behind optimizing online videos for search success, especially with regard to organic search. Truth is, we’ve […]
The ever-helpful teams writing for Google’s Webmaster Central blog and Microsoft Live Search’s Webmaster Center blog have published a variety of videos and presentations this week in the name of helping webmasters and search engine optimizers.
As we are in the cycle of the presidential election, there have been several high profile examples of how search is influencing and playing into the consumption formula for online video. Two specific examples demonstrate how search either reinforces the opportunity big media has in capturing their share of the explosive growth in online video, […]
The new iGoogle theme just launched, which adds “full canvas views for gadget and support for full feed reading.” In short, the new view places the tabs that you typically see at the top, under the search box, now on the left hand side. It then allows you to add gadgets that support canvas view, […]
“Semantic web” is one of those phrases that’s tossed around loosely these days, used to describe just about anything that goes beyond basic keyword search to surface relevant content on the web. But true semantic web applications, those that enable people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications or web sites, are still relatively […]
Google has long been seeking to diversify its revenue base and ad products to attract more ad dollars and different types of advertisers. There’s a lot more money, for example, in brand advertising than in direct response. The YouTube acquisition was partly about getting more display/brand ad dollars. Google’s DoubleClick acquisition was also about targeting […]
If the G1 vs. iPhone comparison were a presidential debate, the iPhone would have won — but not decisively. That’s according to a flurry of reviews out today in advance of official delivery of the first Android phone on October 22. As with the iPhone, there are many likes as well as dislikes among the […]
E-Consultancy reports Google has reintroduced the ability for UK AdWords advertisers to place search ads for gambling. In June 2007, Google placed a ban on all gambling ads in the UK, this decision seems to now have been reversed.
If you visit Google.co.uk today, you may notice that Google has a special logo up for Queen Elizabeth II. The logo looks like this:
Anyone watching tonight’s US Presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama heard both candidates speak directly to “Joe The Plumber” several times. No, it’s not a fictional Joe. No, it’s not Sarah Palin’s Joe Six Pack. He’s a real person that Obama spoke to earlier this past weekend about economic concerns and taxation. But […]
VideoSurf, the new video search engine that I uncharacteristically raved about a little over a month ago, is now live for everyone to use. As I wrote then, “VideoSurf is one of the most innovative, radically different approaches to video search (or any kind of search for that matter) that I’ve ever seen. Even better: […]
Last month I had the good fortune of becoming ‘certified’ in Landing Page Optimization through MarketingExperiments out of Jacksonville Beach Florida. Several times a year, their team brings a hundred or so marketers through the 2-day workshop. The material is similar to that of their free Wednesday web clinics but in a much more intense, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Roll Call this week lays out the current state of the Google-Yahoo advertising deal, and says Microsoft is exercising “its considerable political clout” in Washington, DC, against Google. The article portrays Microsoft as aggressively using its in-house and outside lobbyists to rally public and private support against the deal. And, get this, one of the […]
Last year, Common Craft produced a great, short video explaining RSS “in plain English.” The company is back now with another wonderful one, Web Search Strategies in Plain English. It’s less than three minutes long and does a great job explaining how to use some of the most simple “power” commands at searchers’ disposal — […]
Via Resource Shelf, we learn of a report in Library Journal that says Google is close to settling a three-year-old lawsuit with publishers surrounding Google Book Search. Meanwhile, some of Google’s university partners have banded together to launch their own book search service, Hathi Trust. In the legal case, five publishers sued to stop Google […]
Having written about search for years, it’s often easy for me to mistakenly assume that everyone gets it. Search is where the customers are. Surely every business owner, large or small, understands by now the importance of appearing before these customers in search. Surely. But as I’ve looked for local businesses to help with my […]
Earlier this year, Search Engine Land participated in its first conversational marketing campaign through our ad partner, Federated Media. We’re now doing another one, and this is a short post to ensure readers know that while we’re taking part in a new “conversation,” our writers are not being told what to say as part of […]
A new JupiterResearch, Marin Software-sponsored study has found some surprising things about large-search marketers and their SEM spending: more than 90 percent would spend as much as 22 percent more — if they had better tools and technology to manage complex campaigns. That potentially represents hundreds of millions — even billions — of dollars that […]
Proving what many of us in the search industry have long suspected, a report today on CNN says searching the web makes you smarter. Dr. Gary Small, a professor at UCLA, studied the brain activity of two groups of elder adults — one with “Web savvy” and one without. The study used MRI technology to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google has announced several new ways to use and control its Google Translate service, including the support of new HTML tags and attributes that will prevent Google from translating your content.
Silicon Alley Insider was reporting that a Yahoo-AOL deal was imminent. Now the site says that a source within Time Warner contradicted the imminent claim but says the parties are still talking. Meanwhile just a hop, skip and a jump from AOL’s Virgina headquarters, Google and Yahoo are seeking to head off a US Justice […]
Yahoo has announced another search index update this morning: “We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” Yahoo seems […]
Perhaps the “third leg” of the new YouTube monetization stool, the site has introduced “promoted videos.” These ads are to YouTube video search results as Google paid search is to organic listings. AdAdge wrote about the new ads yesterday. This new ad unit joins “click to buy” and ads on full-length shows, which were also […]